18th September 2012 Archive

Microsoft has announced pricing for the next version of its Office productivity suite, and judging by its aggressive new licensing structure, it would much rather have customers sign up for the new Office 365 subscription model than buy the software outright.

VMTurbo, the startup that created a control freak that uses Adam Smith's invisible hand to allocate resources on public and private clouds, is now applying the same economic scheduling engine to application onboarding – the act of bringing applications from the physical world or another cloud into your own or into public capacity you acquire.

If you're looking for a cheap 10in Tegra 3 Android tablet, I'd say buy an Acer A510. If you want one with a 1080p screen and have deep pockets, then take a look at the Asus Transformer Infinity. Now, if you want something in between, with the Infinity’s screen resolution but the A520’s relative affordability, well, that's a different question altogether.

Some Reg readers think so. This is what a few of you tell us about agile development: "Often of a lower standard and the system will inevitably be less reliable". "If you don't have good people, you're screwed". "It leads to several wheels being reinvented in disparate ways".

Twitter has said that government plans to increase the UK intelligence services' communications surveillance capabilities could cause it to breach the privacy rights of individuals based elsewhere in the world.

Leeds City Council's ICT department is stepping up its efforts to help save the council money in the medium to long term. This will include the introduction of new IT asset management software and potential further development of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) options for employees and council members.

Despite threats to its software hegemony from Apple and others, Microsoft's stranglehold on enterprise IT has been its saving grace. Yet this advantage has started to fade as Apple and Android increasingly invade the enterprise through smartphone adoption, with IT departments scrambling to devise security policies that plug the holes created by this bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon. While many expected Microsoft to respond by shoring up its enterprise credentials, arguing that Office will be the big driver of Windows tablet adoption, the software giant has apparently elected to take a much riskier, and gutsier, approach: turn Windows 8 into a serious gaming platform.

Elpida bondholders trying to stop the sale of the wounded DRAMurai warrior to Micron have taken the fight to the US courts, claiming that the bankrupt Japanese firm has had "unauthorised" transactions in the States.

The SEC has barred former Systemax veep Gilbert Fiorentino from being a director of a PLC again after finding he "fraudulently" pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation over five years.

Keen on live theatre but unable to afford West End prices? Digital Theatre has the answer. It has recorded a number of productions and made them available online. Now they're coming to Samsung Smart TVs too.

A top NASA boffin has outlined ongoing lab experiments at the space agency aimed at first steps towards the building of a warp-drive spacecraft theoretically capable of travelling at 10 times the speed of light.

Amazon has unveiled a mapping API that offers an exit strategy from Google Maps for its developers. The new API is aimed at devs who want to incorporate mapping into apps on Amazon's pocket cash registers tablets such as the Kindle Fire, and uses Nokia's mapping services – Nokia Location Platform.

Two Romanian nationals who were extradited to the US in May have confessed their involvement in a $10m scam aimed at stealing credit and debit card data from payment terminals at hundreds of Subway restaurants and other merchants across the US, according to the United States Attorney's Office.

iPhone 5? Old news. It's all eyes on the as-yet-unannounced iPad Mini now. And the rumour mill continues to churn stuff out for them. The latest: a trio of smartphone-shot snaps of the alleged compact slab.

A trio of public-interest groups plans to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission charging that AT&T's requirement that its subscribers move up to a higher-priced plan if they want to use Apple's FaceTime video conferencing over wireless broadband is in violation of the FCC's net-neutrality rules

Microsoft has predicted that Windows 8 and Windows RT will usher in a new era of touch-based computing, but if leaked pricing from Asus is anything to go by, customers will have to pay a pretty penny to share in Redmond's vision.

Back in May, when Nvidia divulged some of the new features of its top-end GK110 graphics chip, the company said that two new features of the GPU, Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism, would help GPUs run more efficiently and without the CPU butting in all the time. Nvidia is now dribbling out some benchmark test results ahead of the GK110's shipment later this year inside the Tesla K20 GPU coprocessor for servers.

Shares of Research in Motion spiked briefly on Tuesday on news that the struggling smartphone maker had signed a new licensing agreement with Microsoft, but investors who hoped the deal meant Redmond would bundle BlackBerry technology with its phones were in for a disappointment.